​Carolyn holds a BA summa cum laude in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she researched personality, trauma, the psychology of meat eating, and political protest movements. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She has taught English and Democracy Studies in the USA and abroad, including in Kolkata, India's red light districts and to political exiles at the Thailand/Burma border. She is now an English professor and offers services for Personality Typology Coaching. Carolyn is a longtime vegan and Buddhist.

Carolyn's 2010 MFA thesis, "Reading Traumatized Bodies of Text," was published at Nebula a Journal of Multidisciplinary Scholarshipand explains the mode of writing which informs much of her work. She writes: "This is a chronically traumatized—and traumatizing—society, and the magnitude of its trauma is a relatively new development in history. We need narrative forms that can accommodate this reality. We need to represent the unrepresentable in a thorough and complicated manner that does as much justice to it as possible. Furthermore, we need styles of interpreting and reading that can accommodate this reality. Traumatic sites are not linear sites, are not simple sites, are perhaps not even comprehensible sites... Though more traditional literary forms serve a crucial purpose in the witnessing and integration of trauma, we also need language and syntax which take that first step of meeting traumatic shattering where it is at—and readers who can do the same. We need both the text and the reader-witness to attend to the traumatized space; to hold it with a tolerance for ambiguity and confusion; to maintain the heartbeat of patient, compassionate witnessing that will make real the possibility of healing, integration, and ultimately, a new world. This is a politically and culturally indispensable concern of literature."

"My goal is simply to encourage people to meet a piece of writing on its own terms, to shake hands and look it in the eye, even when the writing seems unusual or difficult, because these kinds of interactions between art and humans have alchemical potential." --Carolyn Zaikowski